I have this trifecta of Crazy White Woman 90s Thrillers that I will put on when the spirit moves me to camp out in front of the television while knitting and eating cookie dough straight off the tube.
If your movie poster doesn’t have a simulated rip, what are you even doing?
I feel like they don’t really make a lot of movies like this anymore. Lifetime is doing their best to keep the low-budget thriller alive, but when they mean low-budget they mean absolute basement pennies. The big studios have become so risk-averse that if the movie isn’t projected to do a billion dollars, they’re hesitant to roll the dice. You can stumble upon a pretty decent movie from a smaller studio here and there, but they’re not thrillers. The rom-com and the thriller have both been pushed aside in favor of horror, quirky dramedies, and mid-budget action. Streaming is the only place to really get that good 90s Popcorn Movie moment, but there is so much content to sift through (and much of it a waste of time) that I find myself watching 8 hours of a series that got good reviews as opposed to trying to find four or five good movies.
I don’t know what pushes some movies up the algorithm while others languish on the vine, but I scroll through Netflix’s top ten pretty regularly to see if anything looks interesting, and I do know that for every movie as bad as The Deliverance, there isn’t a quality counterpart like Rebel Ridge — I just happened to get lucky last weekend.
Rebel Ridge jumps straight into the deep-end very quickly. Within five minutes we’ve set up the entire conflict: A Black man, unjustly stopped, harassed, and (legally) robbed by the police embarks on a mission to correct that grievance. I don’t think my blood pressure has ever shot up so quickly from the opening of amovie, but I was so on edge I actually turned it off and decided to watch something else. I caught an episode of Girlfriends while I finished folding my laundry, but something in the back of my head wanted to see what would happen next back on the Ridge because 1) The reviews were good and 2) Aaron Pierre is the hottest man in Hollywood (on Earth???) right now.
So I turned it back on, kept calm, and just watched the story unfold. What really settles Rebel Ridge into a classic 90s thriller for me is the realism. There are no special effects. Everything that happened on screen could happen in real life to the point where a lot of people wondered if this was a true story. The characters felt grounded in the reality of people we do know in our lives: racist cops, single mothers desperately trying to eke out a living, Black women just doing their job and keeping their head down, white men who aren’t good but have a moral line somewhere in their psyche that they’re not prepared to cross, Black men facing roadblocks at every turn. And none of the acting gave Over the Top Lifetime. I felt like I was watching real people in a small town.
The mystery and suspense of it all was the other piece of 90s nostalgia for me. At no point in the movie was I 100% certain what would happen as a result of any given interaction. The build-up of tension was so deftly done, I found myself audibly exhaling at the end of a scene more than once. On a micro level, my interest never waned because I never knew when a conversation would continue to escalate or move to the next scene. On a macro level, I just didn’t understand what the overall motivations of the antagonists were (other than racism) and we don’t get the full picture until the third act. Rebel Ridge was already good, and then they found a way to make me care about the ultimate resolution.
Admittedly, it’s not the best movie ever made. It’s about 20 minutes too long, Aaron has some scenes where he certainly does not live up to the hype as The Next Denzel, and there are a couple of moments where some characters felt more like “this is what you would do in a movie to make it interesting” as opposed to “this is how a real person would behave in this situation,” but overall, I was highly satisfied with this weekend popcorn movie. I’ma discuss something I really liked (and didn’t expect) about the movie down below, so stop here if you haven’t watched it already and are planning to.
Score: 8/10
Spoiler: As soon as that white girl came on the screen, I rolled my eyes. Anytime there is a man, in a stressful situation, where a Smart Woman has to come give the lay of the land, that man and woman end up in a romantic situation. Whether they fall in love over the course of the movie, or just become swept up in a moment of adrenaline, they always end up in a lip-lock. I was so glad we got through the entire movie with absolutely zero sparks. Not to sound like a Puritan Gen Z, but I get so exhausted by the need to shoehorn a romantic arc into every single movie, I was very excited not to see it here — because it absolutely would not have worked with those two characters.
Also, personal preference, but I wish she was a gay man. I want to see a buddy comedy or buddy action flick or buddy thriller where the Smart Knowledgeable Sidekick to the Stoic Brawn isn’t a slight woman with delicate features who needs saving — stick a gay man in there instead! Picture the main character going to the courthouse and the only person to help him is a quiet homosexual who knows too much? That would have pushed the movie to a 9 for me for the sheer unexpectedness and interesting personal dynamics of it all.
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